Greg Egan

Greg Egan (born 20 August 1961) is an Australian science fiction writer and mathematician, best known for his works of hard science fiction. Egan has won multiple awards including the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Hugo Award, and the Locus Award.

Life and work
Egan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from the University of Western Australia.

He published his first work in 1983. He specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness. Other themes include genetics, simulated reality, posthumanism, mind uploading, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and the superiority of rational naturalism to religion. He often deals with complex technical material, like new physics and epistemology. He is a Hugo Award winner (with eight other works shortlisted for the Hugos) and has also won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. His early stories feature strong elements of supernatural horror.

Egan's short stories have been published in a variety of genre magazines, including regular appearances in Interzone and Asimov's Science Fiction.

Mathematics
In 2002, Egan co-authored two papers about Riemannian 10j symbols, spin networks appearing in Riemannian quantum gravity, together with John Baez and Dan Christensen. Spin networks also play a central role in his novel Schild's Ladder released the same year.

In 2014, Egan conjectured a generalization of the Grace–Danielsson inequality about the relation of the radii of two spheres and the distance of their respective centres to fit a simplex between them to also hold in higher dimensions, which later became known as the Egan conjecture. A proof of the inequality being sufficient was published by him in 2014 under a blog post of John Baez. They were lost due to a rearrangement of the website, but the central parts were copied into the original blog post. Further comments by Greg Egan on 16 April 2018 concern the search for a generalized conjecture involving ellipsoids. A proof of the inequality also being necessary was published by Sergei Drozdov on 16 October 2023 on ArXiv.

In 2018, Egan described a construction of superpermutations, thus giving an upper bound to their minimum length. On 27 February 2019, using ideas developed by Robin Houston and others, Egan produced a superpermutation of seven symbols of length 5906, breaking previous records.

Personal life
As of 2015, Egan lives in Perth. He is a vegetarian and an atheist.

Egan does not attend science fiction conventions, does not sign books, and has stated that he appears in no photographs on the web, though both SF fan sites and Google Search have at times mistakenly represented photos of other people with the same name as those of the writer.

Awards

 * Permutation City: John W. Campbell Memorial Award (1995)
 * Oceanic: Hugo Award, Locus Award, Asimov's Readers' Award (1999)
 * Distress: Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis as Best Foreign Fiction (2000)

Egan's work has won the Japanese Seiun Award for best translated fiction seven times.

Teranesia was named the winner of the 2000 Ditmar Award for best novel, but Egan declined the award.

Novels

 * An Unusual Angle (1983), ISBN 0-909106-12-6
 * Quarantine (1992), ISBN 0-7126-9870-1
 * Permutation City (1994), ISBN 1-85798-174-X
 * Distress (1995), ISBN 1-85798-286-X
 * Diaspora (1997), ISBN 1-85798-438-2
 * Teranesia (1999), ISBN 0-575-06854-X
 * Schild's Ladder (2002), ISBN 0-575-07068-4
 * Incandescence (2008), ISBN 978-1-59780-128-7
 * Zendegi (2010), ISBN 978-1-59780-174-4
 * Dichronauts (2017), ISBN 978-1597808927
 * Perihelion Summer (2019), ISBN 978-1-250-31378-2
 * The Book of All Skies (2021), ISBN 978-1-922240-38-5
 * Scale (2023), ISBN 978-1-922240-44-6
 * Morphotrophic (2024), ISBN 978-1-922240-51-4

Orthogonal trilogy

 * The Clockwork Rocket (2011), ISBN 978-1-59780-227-7
 * The Eternal Flame (2012), ISBN 978-1-59780-293-2
 * The Arrows of Time (2013), ISBN 978-0-575-10576-8

Collections
Axiomatic (1995), ISBN 1-85798-281-9 • The Infinite Assassin (1991)

• The Hundred Light-Year Diary (1992)

• Eugene (1990)

• The Caress (1990)

• Blood Sisters (1991)

• Axiomatic (1990)

• The Safe-Deposit Box (1990)

• Seeing (1995)

• A Kidnapping (1995)

• Learning to Be Me (1990)

• The Moat (1991)

• The Walk (1992)

• The Cutie (1989)

• Into Darkness (1992)

• Appropriate Love (1991)

• The Moral Virologist (1990)

• Closer (1992)

• Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies (1992)

Our Lady of Chernobyl (1995), ISBN 0-646-23230-4

• Chaff (1993)

• Beyond the Whistle Test (1989)

• Transition Dreams (1993)

• Our Lady of Chernobyl (1994)

Luminous (1998), ISBN 1-85798-551-6

• Chaff (1993)

• Mitochondrial Eve (1995)

• Luminous (1995)

• Mister Volition (1995)

• Cocoon (1994)

• Transition Dreams (1993)

• Silver Fire (1995)

• Reasons to Be Cheerful (1997)

• Our Lady of Chernobyl (1994)

• The Planck Dive (1998)

Dark Integers and Other Stories (2008), ISBN 978-1-59606-155-2

• Luminous (1995)

• Riding the Crocodile (2005)

• Dark Integers (2007)

• Glory (2007)

• Oceanic (1998)

Crystal Nights and Other Stories (2009), ISBN 978-1-59606-240-5

• Lost Continent (2008)

• Crystal Nights (2008)

• Steve Fever (2007)

• TAP (1995)

• Induction (2007)

• Singleton (2002)

• Oracle (2000)

• Border Guards (1999)

• Hot Rock (2009)

Oceanic (2009), ISBN 978-0-575-08652-4

• Lost Continent (2008)

• Dark Integers (2007)

• Crystal Nights (2008)

• Steve Fever (2007)

• Induction (2007)

• Singleton (2002)

• Oracle (2000)

• Border Guards (1999)

• Riding the Crocodile (2005)

• Glory (2007)

• Hot Rock (2009)

• Oceanic (1998)

The Best of Greg Egan (2019), ISBN 978-1-59606-942-8

• Learning to Be Me (1990)

• Axiomatic (1990)

• Appropriate Love (1991)

• Into Darkness (1992)

• Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies (1992)

• Closer (1992)

• Chaff (1993)

• Luminous (1995)

• Silver Fire (1995)

• Reasons to Be Cheerful (1997)

• Oceanic (1998)

• Oracle (2000)

• Singleton (2002)

• Dark Integers (2007)

• Crystal Nights (2008)

• Zero For Conduct (2013)

• Bit Players (2014)

• Uncanny Valley (2017)

• 3-adica (2018)

• Instantiation (2019)

Instantiation (2020), ISBN 978-1-922240-39-2 • The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine (2017)

• Zero For Conduct (2013)

• Uncanny Valley (2017)

• Seventh Sight (2014)

• The Nearest (2018)

• Shadow Flock (2014)

• Bit Players (2014)

• Break My Fall (2014)

• 3-adica (2018)

• The Slipway (2019)

• Instantiation (2019)

Sleep and The Soul (2023), ISBN 978-1-922240-47-7 • You and Whose Army? (2020)

• This is Not the Way Home (2019)

• Zeitgeber (2019)

• Crisis Actors (2022)

• Sleep and the Soul (2021)

• After Zero (2022)

• Dream Factory (2022)

• Light Up the Clouds (2021)

• Night Running (2023)

• Solidity (2022)

Phoresis and Other Journeys (2023), ISBN 978-1-922240-50-7 • The Four Thousand, The Eight Hundred (2016), ISBN 978-1-59606-791-2

• Dispersion (2020)

• Phoresis (2018), ISBN 978-1-59606-866-7

Other short fiction
• Artifact (1983)

• The Way She Smiles, The Things She Says (1985)

• Tangled Up (1985)

• Mind Vampires (1986)

• Neighbourhood Watch (1987)

• Scatter My Ashes (1988)

• The Extra (1990)

• The Vat (1990)

• In Numbers (1991)

• The Demon's Passage (1991)

• Fidelity (1991)

• Before (1992)

• Dust (1992)

• Worthless (1992)

• Reification Highway (1992)

• Wang's Carpets (1995)

• Yeyuka (1997)

• Only Connect (2000)

• In the Ruins (2013)

• Didicosm (2023)

• Death and the Gorgon (2024)

• Vouch for Me (2024)

Excerpted

 * Diaspora:
 * "Orphanogenesis" in Interzone issue 123, September 1997

Academic papers

 * An Efficient Algorithm for the Riemannian 10j Symbols by Dan Christensen and Greg Egan
 * Asymptotics of 10j Symbols by John Baez, Dan Christensen and Greg Egan
 * Conic-Helical Orbits of Planets around Binary Stars do not Exist by Greg Egan

Short movies
The production of a short film inspired by the story "Axiomatic" commenced in 2015, and the film was released online in October 2017.